The Pen and The Sword
by I'm a Tiny Bronco
Summary: A traveling reporter for The Midgar Times is hired to shadow the legendary Cloud Strife on a series of deliveries that will take them on the same route AVALANCHE took to save the Planet.
1. Read All About It

I've been out here for hours with the other diggers, my pickaxe working in a steady rhythm in the orchestra of digging tools, but today I'm the one to ring metal against metal, instead of the spit and pull of the earth. In over a year at the outpost, this is the first damned piece of treasure I've ever found.

"Hey, the writer finally found something!" I hear Graves call out, standing over me outside my shallow hole. I drop the pickaxe and pull out a small shovel I had stuck in the ground by my left boot, clearing away the excess dirt around the object and wiping it with my gloved hands. I stare at it for a moment, not really knowing what to say. Graves frowns, tipping the lip of his hat upward. "Huh," he says.

I pull the golden skull out of the ground and hold it up in front of me, wiping more dirt off. I look at it a little longer, and then hand it up to Graves, who takes it with an outstretched hand and frowns at it some more. "Who's do you think it is?" Graves asks.

"Beats me," I laugh, flopping back against the side of my hole, "The Gingerbread Man?" I take off my gloves and pull a pack of smokes from my pocket. I've cut down a lot. I bought the pack off a trader a month before and I still have half of them left. The air is so clean out here. It comes off huge glaciers further inland and rolls down to the ocean shore, which is maybe 200 yards from where I'm sitting, so you get that salty ocean taste in your mouth as well. Clean livin'!

Graves puts his thumb in one of the skull's eye sockets, apparently deep in contemplation. "Is it worth anything?" Graves asks. I light the cigarette and breathe it in deep.

"Doubt it," I say with a puff of smoke, "I mean it's gold, sure, but it's not something you want on your mantelpiece." I flick the ashes off the tip of my cig. Graves turns the skull over in his hands and hands it back to me.

"You'd probably get a few thousand gil for it," Graves says. I sit the skull down next to me and continue my habit. The smoke curls around my dirt-stained tan khakis, my dirt-stained brown boots, my gray-white thermal and forearms, which are stained with dirt, and up around my dirty face and hair. I have short, dirty blond hair, brown eyes, a face, you know the drill. I have a beard like pretty much everybody else in Bone Village, except Tooky, who hasn't shaved in six months and only has a scraggle of blonde nastiness around his chin and cheeks to show for it. This place needs more girls.

"Hey what'd he find?" I hear Tim call from across the dig site.

"Golden skull!" Graves calls back, turning away from me to face Tim. There is only that steady rhythm of pickaxes for a moment, then-

"Is it worth anything?" Tim asks.

"Jason doesn't seem to think so," Graves says.

"He'd probably get a few thousand gil for it."

"That's what I said."

"Yeah."

The ring of my cell phone breaks the moment. I forgot I had it with me. I wrestle the thing out of a secure pocket halfway down the pant leg and flip it open.

"This is Jason Weed," I say.

"You've stopped saying 'You've got weed' when you answer the phone?" my editor's voice crackles across the ocean.

"Sorry Todd I didn't know it was you," I say. Todd is technically my boss at The Midgar Times, but it's hard to treat him that way since he's basically been letting me do whatever I want since I joined the paper ten years ago. I basically pick whatever place on the map might have an interesting story and they pay for me to go there. Even my first year as an intern they sent me all over Midgar, whereas a lot of journalists are assigned single sectors.

"I've got some good news for you, Weedy," Todd says, probably from the 50th floor of the ShinRa building, where the offices are, "He's ready." I stand up in my hole, looking past Graves to that tiny pathway in the woods, where a distant, eerie light shines. The story I'm writing is basically about that path, which is an otherworldly passageway to The Forgotten City. Most people still don't believe it exists, least of all the miners of Bone Village. I'd done the part of my story on the miners, and now it was time to go to The Forgotten City and see it for myself. I just needed an escort. There weren't too many people on Gaia who had made it through there alive, and they were all former members of AVALANCHE. Todd had insisted on picking the one who would never answer his cell phone.

"Cloud?" I say, "You got a hold of him?"

"He's agreed to bring you into the city, but there's a catch," Todd says. I wait, staring at that light through the woods. In the pause he purposely created from saying there was a catch, Todd could have easily just told me what it was. He knows I don't like that, by the way. "He wants to go into the city from the north side," Todd says. A fresh breath of smoke catches in my throat. I let the breath out slowly.

"I am on the south side, Todd," I say.

"He's going to be making a series of deliveries from Midgar all the way up to the arctic and he's going to take you to the city after he's done," Todd says.

"Oh great. So I'll just crawl through the icy tundra and meet him then."

"No, that's where it gets good. You'll be traveling with him."

I drop my cigarette on the ground.

"What?" I say.

"You're going from Midgar to The Forgotten City with the world's most reclusive hero!" Todd yells, "And on the way, you're going to do an expose on that pretty bastard! You'll be interviewing him as you traverse the exact same path he took to fight Sephiroth! It's not going to get any better than this Jay, you should be saying yes already."

"How'd you get him to sign off on this?" I ask.

"Well we may be funding his trip a little bit."

"Are you paying him more than me?"

"Uhhh..."

A squealing moan rips out of the woods and a monster's snapping jaws close in front of the light that's held my gaze the last five minutes. A giant red lizard with purple scales along its spine and a long spiky tail bursts through the pathway onto the dig site. The siren goes off. Miners run back as others run forward, machine guns ready. They pump the thing full of bullets, sending the monster moaning and scuttling back towards the woods. The monster is a native of the area and is known for its resilience. Now that the initial shock is over the miners are shooting with bored looks on their faces, waiting patiently for it to drop to the ground, which it finally does, its legs twitching as it falls to its side. The shooting stops. It is quiet.

"Lunch?" Graves asks. Everyone laughs and heads back to the tents. Except for me. I walk to the monster slowly.

"Weedy?" Todd says, "What was that?" My boot crunches the ground right beneath the monsters jaw. I lean over and can see my reflection in his enormous eye, the last bit of life flowing out as a trickle of blood etches across its face.

"Weedy are you okay?" Todd asks.

"Yeah," I say, "I'll do it, it sounds great."

"You bet it does! There's a trader boat coming into the village tomorrow."

"I'll be on it."

I flip the phone shut and walk back towards the tents.


	2. Next Issue

The morning of my departure I am standing in my tent, holding my head. We really tied one on last night. There's not much to do for fun at the outpost except drink, and after I told the guys I was leaving, they insisted on an all-out party. Tim even brought out his own brand of moonshine he's been brewing. He does that every night, but this time we actually drank it. Then Tim, Graves, and George let me smooch their wives, the only three women on the outpost. Reaaaally not enough women out here. I shake my head and slap myself. The trader boat is going to be here in an hour and I need to be ready.

Truth is, there isn't much to pack. I just have a tan-brown rucksack with some stuff for hygiene and a few books and notebooks, and then I just have to take my spare clothes off the clothesline outside and I'm ready to go. Everything else, like the tent and the bed, can just be left here for the next guy to come through here looking for work. It's amazing how much of a home this place feels like with so little. I upgraded to a bed in the corner of the tent after my bedroll got so dirty I had to throw it out. Then there's the night table next to it with my gas lamp and reading glasses- hup, I need those- and in the opposite corner is my little camp stove powered by an unused Lightning materia. It's a low-grade trick used by wanderers like me. You have to be careful with it though because the materia will actually gain experience as you use the stove, and if it goes up in level you're going to overcook your grilled cheese and maybe part of your face and the tent and anybody walking by. Today I'm in my good pair of blue jeans and a striped collared unbuttoned button-down over a white shirt, because I'm trying to look nice for Cloud.

I'm not gay, I just want to make a good impression since I'll be traveling with the guy for however many months. I've never personally met him, but I saw him at the billion press conferences AVALANCHE went through after they defeated Sephiroth. That was seven years ago though. I learned a bit more about him through stories I heard from Nanaki aka Red XIII. I lived in Cosmo Canyon for three years doing stories on Nanaki, his friendship with Reeve aka Cait Sith and Nanaki's grandfather Bugenhaagen, as well as the history of Cosmo Canyon and the life of the people there. You'd think those would be the undisputed best years of my life, but somehow this place is winning out. I don't know what it is. The friends. The alcohol. The strong sexual frustration. Or maybe it's that light shining through the woods, making me believe that anything is possible.

Graves comes into the tent behind me. He hands me a small sack of materia that I had given to him for safe-keeping. "You about ready?" Graves asks.

"I guess so," I say, nodding at the tent, "I'm going to miss this place."

"Don't bother," Graves says, "we'd all be somewhere else if there was somewhere better to go."

"I'm going to the Forgotten City," I say, "You should come with me, Graves." Graves looks at me with empty eyes. Then his eyebrows pop up.

"I'll do that," Graves says, "Let me just tell my wife I won't be making any money to chase a myth in the woods." Then his eyes crinkle in the corners with a smile that glows through his silver mustache, and we share a hug.

"Thanks for everything man," I say. Graves slaps me on the back as we separate.

"I'll walk you to the boat," Graves says, and he heads outside. I take one last look at the tent, and then, reluctantly, I take out the pistol from under my pillow and put it in my rucksack. I am not a fan of weapons- at all- but there are some realities of Gaia you have to face. I shake hands with Tim and Tooky, and pack up the rest of my things. It's a brisk walk to the ocean shore. It's cloudy and the wind is blowing, which doesn't promote the long sentimental goodbye. So I hug Graves one more time at the shore and climb into the little boat with my rucksack. It's going to be a rough ride. "Hey," Graves says, pulling idly at the end of his beard, "I put an extra materia in that bag for you. It's a special one, rare to the area. It's pretty useful around here and I think it might help you."

The trader guns the motor, and the water churns around the boat. I smile at Graves. "I'm sure it will," I say, "Thanks Graves."

"Yeap," Graves says, "okay." He waves goodbye as he turns back toward the village.

"I'll come back!" I call after him as the boat pulls away. I sit down and open my rucksack, pulling out the satchel of materia and opening it by the drawstring. The new materia is at the top, a deep red with slivers of orange shining through. I'd never seen anything like it. Graves is probably upset with me for leaving to try and find what he thinks to be a phantom place that is only heard about in ghost stories around Bone Village. At the end of the day it's hard to be friends with hard men, but he must like me a bit if he gave me this. I put the satchel bag in my rucksack and pull out a hunk of cloth. Pulling back a layer, I can see the empty eyes of the golden skull staring back at me. It's valuable alright. Probably magic. Definitely dangerous. I tie the skull tight in the cloth and drop it in the ocean gliding underneath us. Gaia doesn't need anymore problems than it already has. If it were up to me, like if I was the President of ShinRa, I'd send a team all around the world for the sole purpose of getting rid of all this mystical crap.

Hours pass on the boat. I buy a raincoat off the trader to protect me from the water hurling over the side, and soon enough I can see it from under my yellow hood. The dark clouds hanging over Midgar. Seven years without Mako and still that place is rife with pollution and stressful as hell. I smoke a pack a day whenever I'm there, but I think now I'll be able to hold my ground.

I get a shuttle bus from the shore to Midgar and then from there I take a train into the new Sector 7. I'm a bit queasy walking onto the gray cobblestone, the street lamp shining through the cloudy mid-afternoon. It seems weird to me that they would rebuild after the national tragedy that was the destruction of the pillar, but it's not like the survivors of Sector 7 planned to lose their homes, and if they wanted it back the way it was they had every right. I leave the train station, walking past the new pillar and into town. There are a few teens outside, kicking a ball around and hanging out. I weave through them and stomp up the few short steps onto the porch of the Seventh Heaven bar.

I try to smooth the creases out of my clothes and fluff up the front of my hair with my fingers. Then I push through the saloon-style swinging doors into the bar. There is a beautiful pregnant woman behind the bar, wiping down the counter. She has long, shiny black hair going down to the small of her back and wears an open black leather vest over a white shirt that stretches over her baby bump. She's the fourth woman I've seen in over a year. For a second I'm tempted to ask her out on a date. Especially when she looks up at me with a warm smile.

"Hello!" she says cheerily, "sit anywhere you like." I take a seat at the bar in front of her and put my rucksack at my feet. "What'll it be?" she asks, pulling a glass from beneath the counter. I look past her to the board on the wall, which is covered with pretty writing in yellow and blue chalk. This place has definitely had a woman's touch.

"The daily special looks fine," I say. She fixes the drink. I point at her belly as she hands it to me.

"When are you due?" I ask.

"Not for another six months," she said. She gives me a small smile and a sidelong squint, her dark hair waving over her cheeks. Oh yeah, she knows she's cute. "Are you... the reporter man I've been hearing about?"

"That's me," I say, holding out a hand, "Jason."

"Pleased to meet you Jason," she shakes my hand, "I'm Tifa." Of course I know who she is. There's no civilized person on Gaia who doesn't know the names and faces of every AVALANCHE member. I take a sip of my drink.

"So is Cloud around?" I say. Tifa winces, crinkling her nose and sucking air through her teeth.

"Weeelllllll," she says, breaking into a laugh. I shake my head.

"That guy's a hard man to reach, isn't he?" I say.

"Yeah," Tifa says, followed by a long low giggle that leans her over the bar, "Yeeahhhh, I think he just likes being difficult." I smile at her and look around the bar. I wish single girls were this nice. If I want to avoid flirting with her I'm going to have to find some entertainment while I wait for this (allegedly) reluctant hero of the free world. I see some posters of favorite movies, some tables and chairs, and then I spy the pinball machine.

"Oh snap," I point at the machine, "mind if I play?"

"Oh," she rolls her eyes and waves her hand as she takes my half-finished glass, "it's broken."

"I bet I could fix it," I get up and head over to the machine.

"No really," Tifa says, "we have people coming to fix it on Wednesday, I..."

She stops, turning with a surprised smile towards the front of the shop as the dull roar of a motorcycle rises through the air. I stop in my tracks too, my eyes trying to bore a hole through the wall to the motorcycle outside, where the rider must be parking. I hear the creak of the motorcycle stand over the steady putter of the engine, and then the engine shuts off.


	3. This Just In

Cloud pushes through the saloon doors in a tight black vest, a bangle on his left shoulder, and baggy black pants, setting down a sheathed sword and a small leather bag against the wall. His signature spiky blonde hair is shorter than it used to be and he has a light 5 o' clock shadow. He has a bit more muscle on his arms, and that's pretty much all the aging he's done in seven years.

"Hey stranger," Tifa says to him, pointing an arm out at me, "this is Jason, your reporter guy."

Cloud's eyes don't follow her arm to me, they stay fixed on her. He walks toward her with a warm smile, his boots knocking on the wooden floor, and only when he realizes that I am in his way does he slow to a stop and turn to me, his smile melting into a look of casual indifference.

"Hi there," I hold out my hand again, "Jason Weed." Cloud stares at me for a moment and then shakes my hand.

"I'm Cloud," he says, "what's your weapon?"

"Hm?" I say, my hand dropping back to my side.

"What weapon do you use to get around?" Cloud asks.

"Oh, I carry a small pistol in my bag, but I try to avoid using it. I'm a writer, you know! The pen is mightier than the sword!" I say, and my chuckle dies in the resounding silence. Cloud just keeps that blank stare. Finally, he blinks.

"Yeah, I'm not much of a writer myself, but I get by I guess," Cloud steps past me and stops right in front of Tifa, who smirks up at him through her hair as Cloud puts a hand on her baby bump and holds it there. I can't see his face, just the glint of a small blue earring in his left earlobe, but I know he's looking right at her. After a long while he dips behind her into the bar and pulls a beer out of the fridge. He takes a bottle opener from the counter and works off the cap.

"Well I was just telling Tifa I could fix your pinball machine," I say.

"So what's your limit break?" Cloud asks, the cap ringing on the counter, "do you recite poetry until the enemy gets bored and leaves?"

"Cloud..." Tifa says.

I've been living with a bunch of miners in the middle of nowhere for a year, so this is actually pretty tame, but I can't keep the fake smile on my face. "Something like that," I say. Cloud tips the beer into his mouth.

"The pinball works," Cloud says, "Go ahead. Might take a second to figure out." Cloud walks outside. Tifa sighs and walks into the back. I turn to the pinball machine. Might as well enjoy this before that killjoy comes back. I flip on the machine and the floor shudders underneath me.

"Whoa," I say, "Hey!" Me and the pinball machine start sinking below the floor. It'll take a second to figure out... oh. I sink below the floor into the room underneath. There's a punching bag in the corner, a bunch of AVALANCHE propaganda, and tables and chairs cluttered with papers. This must have been their hideout back in the day, when they were trying to blow up all the Mako reactors. "Cool," I say. I take a small notepad and pen from my pockets and scribble down some detail about the place, adding in some notes about connectors I want to make with the story. I'm so busy writing I walk a haphazard loop around the room, and when I look up I'm staring at three wanted posters for the fallen AVALANCHE members: Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie. Right next to Jessie's poster, at the end, was my first big story for The Midgar Times.

"Shit," I turn away, dropping my notepad and pulling at my hair. The article was called "Terrorist Group Destroys Sector 7 Pillar." I fought tooth and nail to add in to the story that Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie, in their crazed state, had for some reason saved hundreds of civilians in the sector before dropping the plate on it, and now it was probably the best eulogy of the three that they had. I wrote that story when I was 19. I'm 27 now. Cloud must be 31. That's a long time for him to have made up his mind about who I am. How am I going to get him to talk to me now?

Miserable, I go back to the pinball machine and flip the switch, rising back into the bar. I grab my cigarettes out of my pack and stalk outside. Cloud is sitting on the porch to the left of the doors with his sword beside him against the wall, so I take a chair to the right and shakily light a cig. Cloud turns to me.

"My wife is pregnant," he says. I take the cigarette out of my mouth, turning to him.

"I thought she was in the back?" I say. Cloud stares at me through the little smoke curls.

"Do you expect her to stay inside for you?" he asks me. I fling the cigarette into the dirt off the porch. Cloud's eyes follow it, and with a turn of his hand and a pulse of green from his wrist, a small piece of earth shifts and buries the thing. A moment after, Tifa steps outside, throwing me a kind smile as she puts a hand on Cloud's shoulder. She walks off the porch and stops a few feet away, her hair glowing from the Christmas lights that have come on next door. It is nowhere near Christmas. She folds her hands behind her back, staring up at the "sky." Cloud gets up and walks over to her, fitting the sword onto his back. I wonder if he's uncomfortable without it. I am paid to observe. I am good at becoming invisible.

Tifa turns her head to Cloud, her brown eyes glittering from the artificial lights.

"Why do you have to be so mean to our new guest?" Tifa asks, a curious little smile on her face.

"Barrett isn't here," Cloud shrugs, looking away. Tifa keeps looking at him, and finally he turns back to her, his green eyes glittering from the extensive Mako poisoning he's suffered throughout his life.

"You two are going to be stuck together for awhile. It would be good to be stuck with someone who will actually want to protect you," Tifa whispers.

"I don't need protection," Cloud says. Tifa rolls her eyes. So do I. Every TV, radio, or print interview Cloud gave after saving the Planet involved him refusing some completely reasonable offer, followed by long moments of awkward silence.

"You promised to protect me, Mr. Strife," Tifa said, leaning even closer to him, "and nowadays, protecting me means protecting you, too." She plants a long, soft kiss on his lips, and turns to go inside. She notices me as she climbs the porch and drops her head, embarrassed, but brings it right back up in the same step, without breaking her stride. The porch light comes on in the coming darkness, illuminating Cloud alone as he stares out at Sector 7. Slowly, he removes the sword from its sheath. For a wild moment I think he's going to kill me, but instead he just pumps his fist a single time and swings the sword in a circle over his head.


	4. Good Morning Midgar

"This is where I slept my first night in AVALANCHE," Cloud says, pointing to a dusty corner in the secret basement below the bar, "If you really want to describe the situation accurately, I suggest you sleep there."

"It's tempting," I say, nodding thoughtfully at the corner, "but I think I'll take one of the spare rooms upstairs." Cloud thinks this over for a moment before nodding curtly. Even though Cloud isn't smiling at all, I think he might be joking. A little while after Cloud and Tifa's talk, we all sat down for coffee (except Tifa 'cause she's preg) and I was able to get a lot of information from the two about their time in Midgar and the events that led to them leaving in search of Sephiroth. I figured it would be good to interview them together because it was probably going to be hell getting the information exclusively from Captain Sourpuss. It turned out I was right. Tifa gave a lot of the detail about events, things people said, even what time of day it was. Cloud was more like, "We were here, then we went here. This happened. I won. Then I went to Sector 6...". This information was gathered over a series of one-word answers to my questions.

"And what was it like," I said, "when you stayed to fight Rufus Shinra alone?"

"Fine," Cloud replied. Tifa put her arm around him and rested her head on his shoulder. I was able to subtly avoid asking Cloud anything specifically about meeting Aerith and his time alone in Sector 5 with her, and I think they both appreciated that.

"Listen," Cloud says, hitting the switch to bring down the makeshift elevator, "Tifa's going to be having our baby in six months. So I want to do this trip in five. We can sleep in a bit tomorrow, but after that we're going to be getting up very early every day. Be ready for that." I nod as Cloud rises slowly upward. When the bottom of the elevator closes into the ceiling, I flick the switch. Nothing happens. The lights in the basement shut off.

"Ha, ha," I call up, "very funny." I flick the switch a few more times, increasingly furious before I give up and kick at the wall. I go to rest in the same corner Cloud pointed at, the dust floating up around me as I set down. This actually does inform how I'm going to write that part of his story. I think I'm going to add in some things of my own though. Like how Cloud insisted on wearing a dress to rescue Aerith from Don Corneo's mansion, and in fact wanted to wear it for several missions after that. Why not? He's never going to read it, he won't know.

In the morning, there's a crick in my neck. "Wug," I groan, pulling my head off the back wall. I check my watch. 8:37 AM. So much for sleeping in. I get up and slump over to the elevator. "Please," I say, and when I flip the switch the ground shudders and brings me up to the bar. I look around. It is quiet, empty. The door to Cloud and Tifa's room, in the back, is closed, but I can see the light on inside and hear them talking quietly. When did he put the elevator back on? I can't see him getting up early for me. Maybe he turned it on just a few minutes after he turned it off? Whatever, I'm kinda pissed. I'm going to have to figure out some way to get him back.

I walk down the back hallway and up the stairs and go to the guest room Tifa showed me last night. There's a room right next to the guest room. The door closed, the light on. Who...? I guess we're all early risers. I shut the door behind me and drop into the bed, setting my watch alarm for 10 AM before I fall asleep. I awake feeling a lot better, and when I open the door to my bedroom the smell of bacon, eggs, and home fries meets my nose. Nice. Maybe I'll get to see Tifa cooking in her pajamas. I take a quick shower, throw on a white collared shirt over a T-shirt and my khakis and scamper down the stairs. But I'm out of luck. Tifa is in a pair of fluffy pajamas checkered with light and dark blue and another black top and bare feet, looking crazy hot, but she's sitting at the bar drinking water out of a coffee mug. Cloud is at the stove, wearing a black wifebeater, dark blue jeans, and a small sun pendant on a chain around his neck. His blonde hair shakes as he pushes the food around the pan with a spatula. I walk over, sidle up right next to him behind the bar, and shut off the stove. The hiss of the food and grease dies to a soft sizzle. Cloud looks at me and I narrow my eyes.

"Cloud is sorry about leaving you in the basement last night," Tifa says, "he said he forgot you were here."

"I made you some breakfast to make up for it," Cloud says, pushing some of the food onto a plate and handing it to me, "try not to get it stuck in your face." I take the plate.

"Is this about the article?" I ask. Cloud's eyes flick downward. "I tried to honor your friends. It's not easy to do things the right way all the time when you work for Shinra. I thought you would have some understanding of that," I say.

"I do," Cloud says, looking back at me, "So I quit. Why don't you quit and write your articles the way you want?"

"I don't know," I shrug, "but if you do something like that to me again you can bet I'll quit this job and tell my boss to pull the funding for your trip."

"Really. How do you think you'll get to The Forgotten City without me?" asks Cloud.

"I'm surprised you're concerned. You didn't seem to care about that before now," I say. Tifa sets her mug down and folds her hands together. Cloud looks to her. She just shrugs and raises her eyebrows.

"I'm sorry," Cloud says, "You have a point. We need this too."

"We do appreciate what you put in that article," Tifa nods, "about them."

"It wouldn't still be on the wall if we didn't," Cloud agrees, and he holds out his hand for a shake. The smell of the food beneath my nose helps me forgive, so I shake hands. I take a knife and fork from a small pile of silverware off the counter and walk over to the table on the other side of the bar. "I'll make you two some coffee," Tifa says, getting up from her stool.

"I've got it," Cloud says to her, "sit down, it's okay." Tifa slides back onto the stool and Cloud serves her up a plate of the food. He turns on the coffee maker and dishes up two more plates of breakfast.

"So who lives upstairs?" I ask. Just then a girl comes bursting into the bar from outside. The girl is tall with big brown eyes and dark brown hair cut at the shoulders, almost the same color as Tifa's. She's wearing jeans, a pink blouse, and a bright smile. Fifth woman I've seen in over a year, not including train passengers.

"I've got it! I've got a letter from Denzel!" she cries out.

"Ohh!" says Tifa, widening her eyes at me as the new girl scurries over to the bar, "seems to be a good one."

"Every letter from Denzel is a good one- but yeah, this is a good one!" the girl says, "He just got his first assignment from SOLDIER!"

"Woooow, sounds like a big day," says Tifa, turning to Cloud, who blatantly ignores the cue to say something as he pours coffee. "Where's he headed?" Tifa asks.

"He's going to be doing some work in Gold City, that giant casino!" the girl says, "How fun! Oooohh, I wonder if he'll run into Daddy on the way there?"

"Let's hope not," Cloud mutters under his breath. Cloud passes a mug to Tifa, who passes it to me.

"Look at that," Tifa says to Cloud, "she meets her soulmate at 6 years old, they start dating at 13, and just when they're old enough to do some real damage he goes into the military, and she waits for him." Tifa places a hand on her belly, "I can only hope we get so lucky."

"I just hope he's healthy," Cloud says.

"He?" Tifa presses.

"Real damage, huh?" I ask, after a slurp from my coffee cup, "So, you're 18?" The girl looks at me for the first time, her mouth opening and closing wordlessly. Tifa sucks air through her teeth, eyes wide.

"I... should write him back!" the girl says, turning brightly back to Tifa, "where do we keep our stationary and postage stamps?"

"I don't know," Tifa says, tilting her head as she gets up, "let's go look." The girl disappears, but Tifa stops next to Cloud and holds his face in her hands, pressing her forehead against his. I look away and try to drown out their goodbyes with forkfuls of bacon and eggs. Hey, I'm a reporter, but even I'm not that nosy.

"Good luck," I hear Tifa call, and only when I look up to see her turning up the stairs do I realize she was saying it to me.

"Hey Ladykiller," Cloud says, lifting his mug off the counter and walking around the bar, "grab your coffee. Let's go outside." I take my mug and walk out onto the porch. I expect us to sit down and him to have a discussion with me on proper guest decorum, but he just jogs down the porch steps and walks around the corner of Seventh Heaven. I follow him into a large shed with big open barn doors and see Cloud standing next to a huge, slick motorcycle. On the other side of the motorcycle is my rucksack and his leather bag from yesterday.

"Am I supposed to ride behind you on that thing?" I ask.

"Actually," Cloud says, pulling a tarp off an older motorcycle, "I was thinking you'd ride this."

"Whooaaaa," I walk over to it, glancing at Cloud, "really?"

"These are just until we get to my ranch near the marshes. It's a little while outside Midgar," Cloud says, "we're going to stop in Kalm, for your story, and then we'll go by Chocobo over the mountains. It's not the exact route I took the first time, but it will be faster and safer." I sip my coffee and look over the bike. Cloud walks back to his bike, tossing my rucksack over to my feet.

"I talked to Red and Reeve," Cloud says as he straps his leather bag to the back of his bike, "they say you're alright." Red and Reeve became my best friends when I lived in Cosmo Canyon. I am confident that they said that I was more than alright. Then I remember the motor bike I used to get around back then and realized Cloud was just talking about my riding skills. This guy really doesn't care who I am. I sling my rucksack onto the back of my new bike and get on. Cloud sets his mug down on the ground and throttles the engine. I do the the same. The bike comes to life underneath me, and I feel the thrill of a brand new adventure. Cloud is just sitting there for a minute, staring out at the rising sun.

"Dude," I say, and Cloud looks over his shoulder at me. "This is really cool," I tell him. Cloud pulls a pair of sweet sunglasses from a compartment on his bike and pushes them over his eyes.

"Yes it is," Cloud says, and he leans over the bars. We gun the engines and motor out of the shed across the worn, hard-packed dirt of Sector 7, a stray shard of The Midgar Times flapping in our wake.


End file.
